‘A Quiet Place’: John Krasinski Reveals the Tricks Behind the Lantern Scene, Which Really Did Start a Fire — Watch

Enjoy the silence, because the noise is terrifying.

What little noise there is in “A Quiet Place” is all the more effective for its scarcity. One of the film’s tensest scenes comes early on, when the family of four led by John Krasinski and Emily Blunt’s characters are playing Monopoly and a lantern gets knocked over. Now Krasinski, who also directed the near-silent thriller, has broken down said scene for the delight of everyone watching at home. Watch below.

“Because it’s a movie about a family that needs to remain quiet, this is such a perfect atmosphere and one of the best scenes to tell the rules of how to remain quiet, what happens if you don’t,” Krasinski says in the video.

“We knew that sound would not only be a main character, but the character. It’s actually the thing that frames the entire movie together, but more than that, it became about adhering to rules — what sounds, literally, that the audience hears are too dangerous, which ones aren’t. It’s impossible to live silently, and we knew that, so we wanted to bring the audience through this idea of living as quietly as possible.”

“This is that old theory of loading a gun at the beginning of a scene to build tension,” he says, a reference to Chekhov’s gun. “This lantern will obviously become a huge part of the scene in that it is the first major noise you hear.”